Daily Gospel Reflection for July 18, 2018

The Reading and Psalm for today are quite dramatic in their depiction of warring nations and the power of God revealed through such trial and conquest. Its violent images and conflict are such a contrast to the “hidden things” that God has kept from the wise and the learned, but “revealed them to the childlike.”

Today is my daughter’s birthday. Today’s Gospel is also the reading Fr. Donald Howard, S.A. (of blessed memory) helped my wife and I choose for the funeral mass of our firstborn son, Joshua Emet. We have experienced that virulent upheaval and destruction. But we also understand the great treasure and value that children embody and the hope that enjoins them to their parents.

We see in our daughter the fullness of God’s promise in future hope, as much as we see God’s mystery accomplished in Joshua. It is an awesome vision perhaps better treasured as children, to be revealed in time according to God’s will.

But it is Jesus, daily, who points us to the Father. It is through his own death and resurrection that he reconciles and renews our relationship to God. So too as families reach across to those with us and those with God, this joins us with the very real bonds of faith to the God who speaks in power over the forces of destruction, and who makes real the joy of offspring and the creative force of life eternal.

About Author

Jay Cuasay is a freelance writer on religion, interfaith relations and culture. A post-Vatican II Catholic father with a Jewish spouse, he is deeply influenced by Christian mysticism and Zen Buddhism. He was a regular columnist on Catholicism for examiner.com and a moderator and contributor to several groups on LinkedIn. His LTEs on film and Jewish Catholic relations have been published in America and Commonweal. He currently ministers to English and Spanish families at a Franciscan parish. He can be reached at TribePlatypus.com.